I am a Professor of Sociology in the Sociology Department, Fulton
School of Liberal Arts, Salisbury University. I began working at SU in the fall
of 1999, several months after completing my Ph.D. in Sociology at the University
of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, I lived in El Paso, Texas from 1994-1999 doing field
research for my Ph.D. dissertation (and teaching part-time), which was a
case-study of immigration enforcement and the Border Patrol in the El Paso,
Texas/Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua portion of the US-Mexico border, centering on
bureaucracy, human rights, and civic action for social change. The University of
Texas Press has published an updated version of it as a book, entitled Blockading the Border and Human Rights: The El Paso Operation that
Remade Immigration Enforcement (May 2009). I have also written a
1996 book on border enforcement entitled The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes
Home (Center for Mexican American Studies, UT-Austin), which showed that
immigration and drug enforcement along the US-Mexico border became steadily more
militarized from the late 1970s through the early 1990s (police acting more like
military and vice versa). I have also done research on Latino immigration in the local Del-Mar-Va
area, much of it in conjunction with Dr. Ana Maria
Aragonés, a former SU visiting Fulbright scholar from the National Autonomous
University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. We have
a chapter on this (“Recent Mexican Migration to the Rural Del-Mar-Va
Peninsula: Human Rights vs. Citizenship Rights in a Local Context”) in
an anthology published in 2005 (New Destinations of Mexican Immigration in
the United States: Community Formation, Local Responses and Inter-Group
Relations, edited by Víctor Zúñiga and Rubén Hernández-León, editors).
Dr. Aragonés and I have jointly published several other related
publications on our on this topic research in academic journals and anthologies
published in Mexico. Relatedly, in 2004 I co-authored a research report ("Project Adelante
Needs Assessment Report of Latino Immigrants on the Eastern Shore of Maryland
for the Eastern Shore Regional Library," co-author Amy Liebman) based largely on
a lengthy survey of nearly 200 Latino immigrants in the area, a project I co-led with Dr. Aragonés.
The results of the report helped
to better inform area libraries
and other social service providers about this rapidly growing population. I have presented our research findings
on this to various
state and local audiences of policy-makers, commissions and social service
providers. Finally, I have traveled extensively in Mexico and Central America,
and I am fluent in Spanish.

As a faculty member at SU I have
the opportunity to pursue my main interest, teaching and interacting with students.
My classes generally feature a good deal of student interaction, active
participation and discussion, which is made possible by SU's relatively small class
sizes. I am the internship coordinator for the Sociology department, and I am a strong proponent of service- and experiential-learning. In the future I
hope to aid the establishment of study-abroad/international exchange programs between
SU and universities in Mexico. I am also engaged in community service work
related to recent Latino immigration to this area. In general, I strive to build cross-disciplinary bridges with students and faculty around
issues of mutual interest, such as Latin American Studies, Border Studies, Human
Rights, International Migration, etc.